Since the event that has quickly passed into the English language as ‘9/11’, countless individuals have been imprisoned without charge or trial at Guantánamo Bay, at the detention centre at Bagram in Afghanistan and at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. It is clear that while in detainment some have been tortured and all have been subject to inhumane treatment. Others have been shipped to prisons, penitentiaries and police stations in countries known for their human rights abuses. At the same time, liberal democracies have also devised new and unusual methods to discipline and punish, such as the ‘control orders’ recently introduced in the UK. Less startling but equally significant have been the systematic ways in which international laws seem to have been overridden by a new imperial power and the way most western liberal democracies have generated new policies that appear to undermine the basic tenets of liberal jurisprudence and constitutional democracy. In response to the shock and outrage expressed by many against these developments, we have been told that we are living in exceptional times, and such times require exceptional powers: it's a state of emergency. Perhaps, then, the key date for our times is 9/14 rather than the actual attack three days earlier, for this was the day the US President declared a state of emergency.